Lib at Large: Huey Lewis and the News celebrate the 30th anniversary of 'Sports'

TO COMMEMORATE the 30th anniversary of their blockbuster "Sports" album, Huey Lewis and the News returned to Mill Valley's 2 A.M. Club the other day. Not to drink, necessarily, but to pose for an update of the photo of the band in their hometown bar that was on the cover of the album that shot them out of Marin County into Reagan-era, 1980s rock stardom.

"Sports" delivered a grand slam of Top 10 hits — "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "I Want a New Drug," "Heart and Soul" and "If This Is It." A fifth single, "Walking on a Thin Line," even cracked the Top-20.

"We didn't know we were going to have four or five hits, we just wanted one," Huey told me, speaking by phone from his Montana ranch. "We needed one, and it turned out we had five. Who knew?"

Huey and the News are celebrating this milestone with a new 30th anniversary issue of "Sports" with all nine original songs digitally remastered along with a second disc with live renditions of all the tunes, some never before released. It comes out on May 14.

After rehearsing in their new studio and office in San Rafael, Huey and the band are hitting the road on a "Sports 30th Anniversary Tour" of North America with more U.S. and international dates being added as we speak.

They've already been on "Dancing with the Stars," "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me," and they are scheduled to play on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on May 15. They're also booked to appear on CBS "Sunday Morning" and "Good Morning America." The Wall Street Journal is working on a piece about them.

If you were around here in the '80s, you probably remember how cool it was that one of the biggest bands of the decade, their songs ubiquitous on the radio, were an entirely homegrown Marin product. Huey, sax player/arranger Johnny Colla, drummer Bill Gibson, keyboardist Sean Hopper, guitarist Chris Hayes and bassist Mario Cipollina were all Marin guys who came out of the local bands Soundhole and Clover and got together at a Monday night jam at Uncle Charlie's in Corte Madera.

Huey wasn't even the lead singer in Clover, but manager Bob Brown bought into him as a frontman the first time the handsome Huey, radiating charisma and good guy charm, walked into his office in Mill Valley.

"Bob is probably the third person on the planet who thought I could sing a song that could be commercial," Huey recalled. Brown, who now owns Rancho Nicasio, parted ways with Huey and the band last year. But through most of their career, Huey says, "He was a relentless advocate for Huey Lewis in the News, which was intrinsic to our success."

It was Brown, after all, who persuaded the band's label, Chrysalis, to let them make their records and videos on their home turf.

"The thing we're proudest of is that we did it ourselves in Marin County," Huey explained. "In 1982, there weren't any bands coming up that made records in their hometown. You didn't do that. You went to L.A. and did it that way. If Bob hadn't pushed so hard, it wouldn't have happened."

But it did. "Sports" was recorded at the Record Plant in Sausalito and Fantasy Records in Berkeley. The choice of the 2 A.M. Club for the cover shot was a natural because in Mill Valley, the bar is a landmark ("turn left at the 2 A.M. Club") and has an authenticity and lack of pretension that seemed to counter the "yuppie rock" label some critics were trying to pin on the band.

"The place kind of looked like us and where we're from," Huey said. "We're local characters anyway."

In today's digital music business, there are any number of ways for young musicians to make records and be heard. Huey, who'll be 63 in July, reminded me that in 1982 there was no Internet, no smartphones, hardly any personal computers, no jam band scene, no YouTube.

"The one avenue to success was Top-40 radio," he said. "What was going on in those days was that you tried to write, arrange and produce a hit record. Everything was driven by that. So we recorded 'Sports' with an ear toward radio."

The casual cover notwithstanding, "Sports" was meticulously, methodically produced to sound glossy and good over the airwaves.

"With the cover, it seems like it could be a pub record," Huey said. "It was really anything but. Each track was handled very specially. Everything was overdubbed piece by piece. Listening to it now, it sounds like a collection of singles. And that's what it was."

Huey and the News were also on the vanguard of rock videos as vehicles into mainstream pop culture. Like the albums, they were also locally made. The video for "Don't Ever Tell Me That You Love Me," for example, was shot in the Cushing Memorial Amphitheater on Mount Tamalpais.

"We dressed in our sharp clothes and went up to the amphitheater on the mountain and goofed around," Huey chuckled, crediting that video for helping them get a record deal.

It was that deal that led to the "Sports" album, rock stardom and now, 30 years later, a tour in which the band, boasting four of the original members, will be playing their breakout album from front to back.

"We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but the important thing is we can still play music for a living, and we've had a career," Huey said. "We have 25 people working for us. All these years later, we're still a cottage industry from Marin County."